The blag of the webcomic

Main menu

Post navigation

Color Survey Results

Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.
—Herman Melville, Billy Budd

I WILL EAT YOUR HEART WITH A FUCKING SPOON IF YOU AKS ANY MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT COLORS
—Anonymous, Color Survey

Thank you so much for all the help on the color survey. Over five million colors were named across 222,500 user sessions. If you never got around to taking it, it’s too late to contribute any data, but if you want you can see how it worked and take it for fun here.

First, a few basic discoveries:

If you ask people to name colors long enough, they go totally crazy.

“Puke” and “vomit” are totally real colors.

Colorblind people are more likely than non-colorblind people to type “fuck this” (or some variant) and quit in frustration.

Indigo was totally just added to the rainbow so it would have 7 colors and make that “ROY G. BIV” acronym work, just like you always suspected. It should really be ROY GBP, with maybe a C or T thrown in there between G and B depending on how the spectrum was converted to RGB.

Overall, the results were really cool and a lot of fun to analyze. There are some basic limitations of this survey, which are discussed toward the bottom of this post. But the sheer amount of data here is cool.

Sex

By a strange coincidence, the same night I first made the color survey public, the webcomic Doghouse Diaries put up this comic (which I altered slightly to fit in this blog, click for original):

It was funny, but I realized I could test whether it was accurate (as far as chromosomal sex goes, anyway, which we asked about because it’s tied to colorblindness) [Note: For more on this distinction, see my follow-up post]. After the survey closed, I generated a version of the Doghouse Diaries comic with actual data, using the most frequent color name for the handful of colors in the survey closest to the ones in the comic:

Basically, women were slightly more liberal with the modifiers, but otherwise they generally agreed (and some of the differences may be sampling noise). The results were similar across the survey—men and women tended on average to call colors the same names.

So I was feeling pretty good about equality. Then I decided to calculate the ‘most masculine’ and ‘most feminine’ colors. I was looking for the color names most disproportionately popular among each group; that is, the names that the most women came up with compared to the fewest men (or vice versa).

Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among women:

Dusty Teal

Blush Pink

Dusty Lavender

Butter Yellow

Dusky Rose

Okay, pretty flowery, certainly. Kind of an incense-bomb-set-off-in-a-Bed-Bath-&-Beyond vibe. Well, let’s take a look at the other list.

Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among men:

Penis

Gay

WTF

Dunno

Baige

I … that’s not my typo in #5—the only actual color in the list really is a misspelling of “beige”. And keep in mind, this is based on the number of unique people who answered the color, not the number of times they typed it. This isn’t just the effect of a couple spammers. In fact, this is after the spamfilter.

I weep for my gender. But, on to:

RGB Values

Here are RGB values for the first 48 out of about a thousand colors whose RGB values (across the average monitor, shown on a white background) I was able to pin down with a fairly high degree of precision:

The full table of 954 colors is here, also available as a text file here (I have no opinion about whether it should be used to build a new X11 rgb.txt except that seems like the transition would be a huge headache.)

The RGB value for a name is based on the location in the RGB color space where there was the highest frequency of responses choosing that name. This was tricky to calculate. I tried simple geometric means (conceptually flawed), a brute force survey of all potential center points (too slow), and fitting kernel density functions (math is hard). In the end, I used the average of a bunch of runs of a stochastic hillclimbing algorithm. For mostly boring notes on my data handling for this list, see the comments at the bottom of the xkcd.com/color/rgb/ page.

Spelling and Spam

Spelling was an issue for a lot of users:

Now, you may notice that the correct spelling is missing. This is because I can’t spell it either, and when running the analysis, used Google’s suggestion feature as a spellchecker:

A friend pointed out that to spell it right, you can think of it as “fuck-sia” (“fuch-sia”).

Misspellings aside, a lot of people spammed the database, but there were some decent filters in place. I dropped out people who gave too many answers which weren’t colors used by many other people. I also looked at the variation in hue; if people gave the same answer repeatedly for colors of wildly varying hue, I threw out all their results. This mainly caught people who typed the same thing over and over. Some were obviously using scripts; based on the filter’s certainty, the #1 spammer in the database was someone who named 2,400 colors—all with the same racial slur.

Map

Here’s a map of color boundaries for a particular part of the RGB cube. The data here comes from a portion of the survey (1.5 million results) which sampled only this region and showed the colors against both black and white backgrounds.

The data for this chart is here (3.6 MB text file with each RGB triplet named). Despite some requests, I’m not planning to make a poster of any of this, since it seems wrong to take advantage of all this volunteer effort for a profit; I just wanted to see what the results looked like. You’re welcome to print one up yourself (huge copy here), but keep in mind that print color spaces are different from monitor ones.

Basic Issues

Of course, there are basic issues with this color survey. People are primed by the colors they saw previously, which adds overall noise and some biases to the data (although it all seemed to even out in the end). Moreover, monitors vary; RGB is not an absolute color space. Fortunately, what I’m really interested in is what colors will look like on a typical monitors, so most of this data is across the sample of all non-colorblind users on all types of monitors (>90% LCD, roughly 6% CRT).

Color is a really fascinating topic, especially since we’re taught so many different and often contradictory ideas about rainbows, different primary colors, and frequencies of light. If you want to understand it better, you might try the neat introduction in Chapter 35 ofThe Feynman Lectures on Physics (Vol. 1), read Charles Poynton’s Color FAQ, or just peruse links from the Wikipedia article on color. For the purposes of this survey, we’re working inside the RGB space of the average monitor, so this data is useful for picking and naming screen colors. And really, if you’re reading this blog, odds are you probably—like me—spend more time looking at a monitor than at the outdoors anyway.

Miscellaneous

Lastly, here are some assorted things people came up with while labeling colors:

Thank you so much to relsqui for writing the survey frontend, and to everyone else who sacrificed their eyeballs for this project. If you have ideas and want to analyze these results further, I’ve posted the raw data as an SQLite dump here (84 MB .tar.gz file). It’s been anonymized, with IPs, URLs, and emails removed. I also have GeoIP information; if you’d like to do geocorrelation of some kind, I’ll be providing a version of the data with basic region-level lat/long information (limited to protect privacy) sometime in the next few days. Note: The ColorDB data is the main survey. The SatOnly data is the supplementary survey covering only the RGB faces in the map, and was presented on a half-black half-white background.)

And, of course, if you do anything fun with this data, I’d love to see the results—let me know at xkcd@xkcd.com.

Related

1,287 thoughts on “Color Survey Results”

Comment navigation

Interesting fuchsia is correct spelling, as it is named after Leonardo Fuchs, but fuschia is a very accepted misspelling. Just type either in and see the results. Now, I will have to remember the name and add ia to the end. Nonton Film Gratis

Property components are a naturally and considerably utilized claim on the value of property solutions because some of the payments for those solutions must be used for devaluation, investing on advanced goods. Nonton Film Gratis

It’s discussed at length elsewhere, but the basic premise is that the first guy picks an end urinal, and every subsequent guy chooses the urinal which puts him furthest from anyone else peeing. park office

It’s described at duration elsewhere, but the primary rumours is that the first guy choices an end urinal, and every following guy selects the urinal which places him furthermost from anyone else urinating. click to read

McKinnon was actually never a plumbing expert in the place, but became engaged with the h2o program and HVAC market operating for Trane while going to university to become an engineer. https://angel.co/leeglovett

Cheers regarding expressing this excellent write-up! That’s very intriguing Smile I like reading in addition to We are always trying to find beneficial information similar to this. to follow Lee Slaughter

Excellent post. I was checking constantly this blog and I’m impressed!
Very useful info particularly the last part :) I care for such information a lot. I was seeking this certain information for a long time.
Thank you and good luck. ketone diet

Remove tillage motivates more positive ground temperature, wetness and aeration conditions for germinating plant seeds and plant vegetation. This can convert to enhanced vegetation organization and early season performance. twitter.com

Having read this I thought it was extremely informative.
I appreciate you finding the time and effort to put this short article together.
I once again find myself personally spending a significant amount of time
both reading and leaving comments. But so what, it was
still worth it!

What other contractor can say they were involved in the design process of an all-electric service vehicle? Not many! Robichaud is a great example of a contractor on the cutting-edge of technology. He serves as an example to others to take a risk and test new technologies. If the technology works, and in this case it seems that it does, it’s a win for everyone. go to my blog

Louisville, Colo., to install solar panels on Precision headquarters to help recharge the batteries for eight hours at night after technicians drive them 120 miles during the day. click to find out more

I suggest that you implement a feature which allows me to continue in the same situation before I closed Mendeley, all tabs, all subwindows, the pdf readers in the same page position. Turlock personal injury attorney

Wow, I LOVE this. I’ve always had a hard time with color names as it feels like rote memorization– nothing about it intuitive for me. At least your survey produced some fascinating results that leave me more curious. Thanks.

Among all reptilian animals that sparkle forked tongues, why select the observe lizard? When you nourish clean various meats to a observe reptile in captivity, it would rather delay another two times to participate its meals spoiled. wise sayings

At first, you must bring out a thorough research and look for the experts that could visit your place and fix your windows and gateways. Moreover, you must demand for 100 % free quotations from the different experts to get the most affordable deal for the house improvement. check this site out

Wow what an amazingly detailed breakdown of color!
I was here looking for ideas for our new lawyer website seo design project.
At first we were going for classic new york city style, more of an aged look with the brown and muted colors you see on the site now (link above).
But on our newest design, being released next week hopefully, we are thinking of brilliant blues, yellow and maybe some greens. I would say more of a google/chango, silicon valley vibe.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Take a look if you get a chance.
You’ll know if we released the new site at the time you are looking at it because the two are so very different.
Thanks for your help.